Fresh Princes of Team USA: How four basketball journeymen wound up in a Beverly Hills mansion vying for Olympic history

Fresh Princes of Team USA: How four basketball journeymen wound up in a Beverly Hills mansion vying for Olympic history

Joe Vardon
May 25, 2021

At the top of a Beverly hill, nestled behind a row of towering green bushes, iron gates and palm trees, lies 8,300 square feet and $16 million worth of luxury afforded to four Americans trying to qualify for the first-ever Olympic 3-on-3 men’s basketball tournament.

Located between two of Southern California’s most famous boulevards, the property sits on the corner of Sunset, with Santa Monica at the base of the hill, and to enter on foot is to walk through a smaller, ornate door, tucked between those bushes and gates. A Formula 1 race car is parked in front of the garage, and a dirt bike is on display in front of the main double doors to the home.

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How else to welcome the reigning MVP for USA Basketball, the No. 1-ranked 3-on-3 player in the U.S., a two-time gold medalist (in non-Olympic events), and a member of one of the NBA’s royal families?

“This is sick,” opined Canyon Barry, as he and his three teammates arrived at the house together, in a black SUV, one Saturday afternoon in May.

The house opened to a marble floor and glass chandelier. To the right, a formal dining room with fresh Olympic basketball artwork on the walls and life-sized mannequins in Team USA jerseys. “That’s dope,” remarked Robbie Hummel, the most “famous” of the players in the house, as he saw the mannequins for the first time. “The art is very sweet.”

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To the left, down a second hallway off of the foyer, the master bedroom has its own fireplace and ornamental desk. A whirlpool tub, set in marble and brick, anchors the master bath. This is where Kareem Maddox, the most experienced of the players, stayed. All six of the bedrooms have their own bathrooms, as well as personal refrigerators, and PlayStation 5 video-game systems.

“Not to be the Debbie Downer of the group, I’m very grateful for everything,” Maddox said, a little sheepishly, “but like, very leery of anything becoming a distraction.”

The eat-in kitchen features a range with seven burners and custom hood, an island with a prep sink, and a double sink on the second counter against the wall, next to a cabinet where all of the household’s wine, champagne and scotch glasses are kept. A stack of red plastic cups is in there, too. Off the kitchen is the smallest bedroom in the house, which went to Team USA’s newest member.

“It’s closest to the food,” a tour guide said to Dominique Jones, upon showing him his room, in a veiled attempt to assuage any concerns over how small his room was compared to those of his teammates. “I love this,” he responded, looking it over. “This is it for me.”

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The family room, roughly the size of your local pool hall, is adorned with contemporary furniture, a projector screen that descends from the ceiling and a baby grand piano. Double doors open to a grass courtyard. Outside, the swimming pool is lined by plush, cushioned beds and lounge chairs, a cabana, and a stone-encapsulated waterfall and jacuzzi. A lonely, floating chipping green drifts silently in the water.

Installers placed a crane in the alley off of Sunset to lift a tiled, outdoor basketball court over an ivy-covered wall and onto the tennis court. Two regulation stanchions with hoops have been installed, and painted on the adjacent privacy wall is a larger-than-life mural of three god-like basketball figures. A collection of weights and benches is stashed in the corner of the court, and there are racks of 3-on-3 basketballs, which are about 1 1/2 centimeters smaller than the ball used in the NBA.

All of this opulence was the brainchild of USA Basketball (which is used to putting its NBA players up on yachts at the Olympics) and Red Bull, the sponsor for 3-on-3 hoops in the U.S. that once built snowboarder Shaun White his own halfpipe to train for the 2010 X Games.

Red Bull used the money it didn’t spend on tournaments canceled in 2020 due to the pandemic to rent the house, where the men lived and trained in preparation for their only chance to qualify for the Olympics — a tournament in Graz, Austria, that starts Thursday.

The American women also must qualify for the Olympics this week in Austria, but their team is made up entirely of WNBA players — Stefanie Dolson, Allisha Gray, Kelsey Plum and Katie Lou Samuelson — who were with their pro teams when the men moved into this house. Instead, they trained for weeks in February, March, and early April, at varying locations. Among them — the plush Washington Duke Inn and Golf Club in Durham, North Carolina.

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“I don’t look at it as opulence, to be honest with you,” argued Jim Tooley, chief executive officer for USA Basketball. “This is a story that’s been in the making for about 25 years. While (the house) is nice, no doubt, it’s trying to set a standard and a level of what this can be. These players aren’t famous to the degree that our NBA guys are, but it’s to create an environment that puts this on the map in terms of ‘this is a serious Olympic sport.’”


You have probably heard of Hummel. The former Purdue star, 32, played two seasons in the NBA for the Minnesota Timberwolves, and now is a broadcaster of college games for ESPN and the Big Ten Network. The floating chipping green was for him.

“I could play golf every day, but I’ll save that for a few years down the road,” he said. “I love to play golf, this takes away from that. There is a lot of stuff that I probably will do otherwise, unless something really changes drastically in the landscape of the sport from the Olympics. I’m committed to playing this year, full go, Olympics, the world tour, and then probably re-evaluate at the end of the season.”

Hummel, and not NBA stars Donovan Mitchell or Kemba Walker or Khris Middleton, was the 2019 Team USA men’s player of the year, because of his performance in 3-on-3. He led the American team to the FIBA World Cup title that year, played in 34 games as part of the 3-on-3 world tour, in 22 countries, and was part of the team that won Red Bull’s U.S. championship in Las Vegas.

Hummel, who grew up in Valparaiso, Ind., and now lives in Chicago, was invited to try the sport while announcing a 3-on-3 tournament during the 2018 NCAA Final Four. He is believed to be the only former NBA player playing consistently on the 3-on-3 world tour.

Barry, 27, is the youngest son of Hall-of-Famer Rick Barry, and half brother to Brent and Jon. Like Hummel, Barry has experience as an American pro, and is currently a member of the Iowa Wolves of the G League. He has the least 3-on-3 experience on Team USA, having not picked up the game until 2019, when he was invited to try out through his mother, Lynn, a standout college player and former USA Basketball executive. Canyon shoots free throws underhanded, like his famous father, and made all 21 foul shots he took during G League bubble play this year.

“I honestly think I am a better 3-on-3 player than I am a 5-on-5 player,” Barry said. “I’m never going to say, ‘No, I don’t want to play in the NBA,’ but I think being able to kind of create something new, with this 3-on-3, and kind of be a pioneer in the U.S. and see it take off here and kind of be known for that would be super exciting.”

Team USA basketball
Maddox and Barry practice on the court that was brought in so Team USA’s Olympic-hopeful 3-on-3 men’s basketball team could train while living together in L.A. They’re now off to Austria for qualifying. (Joe Vardon / The Athletic)

Maddox, 31, is a 6-8, 220-pound Princeton graduate who led the Tigers in scoring (13.8 points per game) and rebounds (7.0) as a senior in 2010-11. He played professionally overseas, like all of his Team USA mates, and he was the MVP of the American national championship for 3-on-3 in 2018.

Maddox has a second career in media. He’s hosted a show on Colorado Public Radio and worked as a podcast producer for Gimlet media until January 2020, when he quit to train for the Olympics. He says he wants to become the “Black Anthony Bourdain,” continuing to play in 3-on-3 tournaments and use the travel opportunities to make travel documentaries, and he’s developing a new podcast about the Olympics that was picked up by NBC.

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“I think what we have is the opportunity to cement our names in whatever the sport ultimately ends up becoming,” he said. “I hope it becomes something cool.”

Jones, 32, is the shortest, softest-spoken member of this team. If you passed him on the street, you would not suspect him of being on the verge of making the Olympics as a basketball player. He is 5-9 and barrel-chested, and just happens to be the top-ranked 3-on-3 player in the U.S., and ninth in the world, according to FIBA. He once played with the Harlem Globetrotters and has won tournaments at all the famous outdoor New York venues, like Rucker Park.

Unlike his teammates, Jones has what the rest of us would consider a regular job. He’s a counselor at Rising Ground in the Bronx, a non-profit that caters to the needs of inner-city residents, especially children. He makes $40,000 a year.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Jones said, of his new surroundings in Beverly Hills. “I’m from New York City, and growing up, like, not a lot of special things happened, not a lot of good. So just having the opportunity to just experience something different was real dope for me.”

When Team USA won the 2019 World Cup, Hummel, Barry and Maddox were on the team. The fourth man was not Jones, but Damon Huffman, a defensive stalwart and long-time 3-on-3 vet.

The current team was picked during the 2020 NBA All-Star weekend in Chicago, after a week-long training camp, when Team USA organizers chose to replace Huffman with Jones — who (along with Maddox) won a Pan-Am gold for the Americans in 2019.

“It’s not awkward for me,” Jones said. “Damon is a great player and he has a lot to offer to the game. I’m not really saying I’m taking his place, but I’m bringing something different, scoring, defense, playing with that chip on my shoulder. I’m the No. 1 player in the U.S. for a reason.”

FIBA Olympic 3X3 Qualifying Tournaments
Dates
May 26-30
Location
Graz, Austria
Structure
20 total teams, broken into four pools
U.S. men's pool
Lithuania, Belgium, South Korea, Kazakhstan
U.S. women's pool
France, Germany, Uruguay, Indonesia
Format
Four-game pool play, top two from each reach knockout stage
To qualify for Tokyo
Must win semifinal or win third-place game

Every day, these four men awoke under the same roof, dined in that spacious kitchen, or out in the courtyard. They were taped and poked and prodded by trainers on tables set up inside the pool house. They practiced together for two hours, put in an hour of individual work on the court, and walked through plays in the evenings.

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At night, they played cards and video games — Call of Duty or NBA 2K, wearing headsets, in their own rooms. They played a little ping-pong — “I’m the best, by far,” Barry proclaimed — and listened to rap music, except when it was Barry’s turn to take the court for his individual work. He played Seattle grunge and his teammates groaned.

“I was playing bangers,” Barry insisted as the others laughed. Then, he turned serious.

“Last year it would have been easy for Kareem and Robbie and Damon to kind of go, ‘Oh, we’ve got this new kid, we don’t really know him, he’s not part of the team,’ but they did such a great job of kind of welcoming me in and making me feel like part of the team even though I haven’t played nearly as much 3-on-3 as any of them had,” he said. “I think we really clicked, I think our World Cup team had great chemistry and now with Dom, I think we are starting to click too where he fits in so well with us.”


It’s 10 a.m. on a Sunday, and the sun is quickly beginning to bake the court. “Every shot we’re gonna take over the next two weeks, we’ll be tired,” barks Joe Lewandowski, 47, the Team USA coach, as he runs the four players through an arduous, timed shooting drill. Next, he demonstrates, and then demands that his players go over each and every screen set on defense, while encouraging them as it becomes clear fatigue is setting in.

“How you talk to yourself matters,” Lewandowski assures them.

The rules of serious 3-on-3 hoops are vastly different from the traditional 5-on-5 sport.

The games are to 21, by 2s and 1s, and last no more than 10 minutes. On a made basket, the defending team must take the ball out of the hoop and immediately dribble or pass it out to the perimeter — there’s no “checking” the ball up top after a basket.

The games are played in the halfcourt, and there is a 12-second shot clock, which quickens the pace of play considerably from the NBA or college.

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In 3-on-3 basketball, there is also no one drawing up plays or making substitutions from the sidelines during games. Should Team USA make it to Tokyo, Lewandowski will be seated in the stands like a tennis coach.

The sport as it exists today in the U.S. can be traced back to legendary Princeton coach Pete Carril, to President Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2008, and to the gritty underpinnings of black-top tournaments in the Midwest, like the ones in which Lewandowski played in the 1990s.

A Cleveland native and accomplished small college player who first attended the Naval Academy to play football, Lewandowski came of age in the 3-on-3 game by barnstorming the Cleveland area and then the United States on the Hoop It Up circuit. Lewandowski was working summer camps for legendary NBA personality John Lucas in 2012 when FIBA turned 3-on-3 into an official sport and USA Basketball was suddenly looking for a coach. He’s been with Team USA ever since, advising both the men’s and women’s teams.

“That Cleveland toughness where you’re sort of the underdog, that’s sort of what these guys are,” Lewandowski said after practice, as he pointed back toward the players, who were seated in inflatable ice tubs by the pool. “The one thing we can’t forget is, we got here because we were grinders. Because you grinded, you get some of these perks, but it’s been a battle to get everything. Maybe that’s the Cleveland in me.”

Team USA basketball
Kareem Maddox (far left) and Dominique Jones (second from left) were part of Team USA’s gold-medal-winning team at the 2019 Pan Am Games. Jones is the newest addition to the group with Hummel and Barry. (Martin Mejia / AP)

Two of Carril’s recruits at Princeton in the late 1970s were John Rogers and Craig Robinson, both of Chicago. Rogers and Robinson became friends on campus while playing for Carril. Another friend of Rogers, Arne Duncan, also of Chicago, played collegiately at Harvard.

As Rogers, Robinson, and then Duncan moved back to Chicago, they played together in a summer 3-on-3 tournament in Grant Park called “Shoot the Bull,” hosted by the Chicago Bulls. They won the tournament three summers during the 1990s, and branched out to play in the Hoop It Up tournaments across the U.S., winning multiple national titles. The whole time they ran a version of Carril’s famous “Princeton offense,” with dizzying passing, backdoor cuts and slipscreens.

Robinson had a sister, Michelle, who married a lawyer and community organizer in town named Barack. Rogers met Michelle through Craig, and he would eventually become one of President Obama’s closest friends and chief fundraisers as he ascended to the White House. Duncan became Obama’s education secretary.

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“At the inauguration, when Barack was elected President, I was fortunate enough to be one of the co-chairs of the inauguration,” said Rogers, 63, in a phone interview. “… And of course Craig is there, and then Arne gets introduced, and he’s secretary of education. So we’re up there on stage, and I get a text from (Kit Mueller, the fourth member of Rogers’ 3-on-3 team and at one time Princeton’s second all-time leading scorer) that says, ‘What am I, chopped liver? I’m the only guy from the team that’s not up on stage.’”

Rogers, who had started Ariel Investments, the first African-American-owned mutual fund company in the U.S., was playing less frequently by 2012. So was Robinson. But Duncan, still in Obama’s cabinet, and Mueller, were playing and recruiting new players who were either Princeton graduates or played for Carril (like Robinson) at other schools.

Every summer, Rogers hired an intern for Ariel from Princeton’s basketball program, and at lunch he invited the intern to play 3-on-3 hoops. If the intern was any good, he could expect a call to play competitively for the Rogers-sponsored team. In 2015, Maddox, the Princeton graduate, got that call, asking if he was interested to fill in at the U.S. national championship for Duncan, who had led Rogers’ team to the American title the year before.

Maddox’s 3-on-3 career blossomed, and Rogers paid to fly his teams to tournaments overseas until FIBA began picking up the tab. As late as last month, Rogers hosted Maddox, Hummel and Jones at his San Diego home for workouts.

“It’s another part of coach Carril’s legacy,” Rogers said.


In the last week of April, just a few days before they moved into the mansion, Maddox and Hummel went on a drive together through Los Angeles, simply looking for a court and a hoop.

“We went into three different parks in L.A., wood over the rims, steel beams, so you can’t play on them,” Hummel said.

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This is not the kind of problem LeBron James, or James Harden, or Kevin Durant would have if they wanted to work out before the start of training camp, even in the COVID era. Pandemic restrictions and protocols are why Team USA organizers said the mansion was necessary.

Maddox and Hummel tell another story, one where access was not a problem and where, for a moment, it was their turn to humble the NBA guys.

While Maddox was at Princeton, he played for coach Sydney Johnson, a friend and high school teammate of Nuggets general manager Tim Connolly. Connolly had also once signed Hummel to a partially guaranteed contract in Denver but cut him at the end of training camp.

In September of 2019, not long after Team USA won the 3-on-3 World Cup, Connolly invited Maddox, Hummel, Huffman and one other player (Barry was unavailable as a member of the Timberwolves organization) to Denver to play against many of the Nuggets’ regulars. Nikola Jokic wasn’t there, but Will Barton, Paul Millsap, Gary Harris, and perhaps even Jamal Murray were among the Nuggets on hand, according to those in attendance.

The game: 3-on-3. And early on, the NBA guys didn’t fare so well.

“It was surprising because the early games we were winning and it was like, ‘How?’” Hummel said. “I think the Nuggets guys hated it. For them it was just miserable cardio, like, ‘Why are we playing this?’”

“The second day they had us back, and we just played 4-on-4 — they just refused (to play more 3-on-3),” Maddox added.

In a phone interview, Connolly didn’t remember the experience being such a downer for the Nuggets. He agreed his players struggled with some of the strategy and concepts of the 3-on-3 game early before catching on.

“To a 3-on-3 novice, you think 3-on-3 is a slow-paced game,” Connolly said, “but as Robbie, Kareem and those guys will show you, the quicker and more detailed the better. I’m so proud of those guys, rooting for them like crazy and I do think it’s a sport we’re going to see take on greater popularity as it becomes more known and more visible.”

Team USA basketball
Artwork featuring the team overlooks a piano in the house’s main living area. “It’s trying to set a standard and a level of what this can be,” Team USA CEO Jim Tooley says of the luxury accommodations. (Joe Vardon / The Athletic)

Which brings us back to the mansion.

Red Bull declined to make any company executive or employee available for an interview, nor would the energy-drink maker disclose how much it spent to rent or furnish the house.

Whether it was the race car or dirt bike parked out front, or the refrigerators placed in every bedroom, or the individualized, neon signs depicting each player’s signature, hanging in the bedrooms, or opened packs of basketball cards dumped onto every coffee, picnic, or dinner table on site, the details mattered. For all involved, this was a longer-term play.

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There is great hope of not only qualifying for the Olympics and winning gold, but for success in Tokyo to be followed by a proliferation of the game in America, meaning more eyeballs, more former college stars and pros, and more sponsors. Currently, the only way to earn any money at all on the 3-on-3 circuit is to win a tournament or finish second.

As the Americans sat around the pool one night after practice, reflecting on all that had been laid out for them at the house, they homed in on why nothing was left to chance.

“I think there is a decent amount of pressure on us, but I think it’s also an opportunity,” Barry said.

“At the end of the day, as long as we get the job done, there are no regrets,” Jones said. “Our legacy can last if we win.”

“I think it’s more a sense of, you need to win because you play for USA basketball,” Hummel said.

“We’re here to do a job. We have a tournament to win at the end of May, and so while everything else is great, all we really need is the hoop and the court,” Maddox said.


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(Top photo: Illustration by John Bradford / The Athletic. Player photo credits: Monika Majer / RvS. Media / Getty Images; Martin Mejia / AP; Chris Marion / NBAE via Getty Images)

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Joe Vardon

Joe Vardon is a senior NBA writer for The Athletic, based in Cleveland. Follow Joe on Twitter @joevardon